Abstract

Filamentation of a circularly polarized short pulse laser propagating along the direction of ambient magnetic field in plasma is studied. The nonlinearity arises through the combined effect of relativistic mass variation and ponderomotive force induced electron cavitation. The growth rate is maximum for an optimum filament size, . and increases with plasma density and ambient magnetic field.

Received 24 March 2009Accepted 28 April 2009Published online 20 May 2009

Acknowledgments:

One of the authors, R.S., wishes to thank the plasma physics group in the Physics Department at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India for their stimulating valuable suggestions on this topic.